[Resolved] making URL calls from PHP code

bill_stennett

Hi All,

Hopefully a simple question for people in the know. I need to rewrite a simple PERL script in to PHP.

The purpose of the script is to call a URL of the form http://www.xxx.xxx/script.pl?a=name

and to read the HTTP headers returned by this script.

In PERL this is simple enough using the LWP::Useragent and HTTP::Request modules.

How can I approach this in PHP though? Can someone please point me in the direction of which PHP functions / libraries are available to access remote URL's and to read the returned content and header information.

The script will need to run under PHP 4.3.

I'd appreciate a little guidance on where to look in the documentation for the right functions to use.

I did find the function get_headers($url) which would be perfect but for the fact that it seems to be for PHP 5 only.

Presumably there is a way of making URL calls in PHP 4?

Many thanks

Bill

bradgrafelman

You want content and headers?

You could probably try litterally opening a socket to the remote address, sending the HTTP GET command, and reading in the data untill the connection closes.

Check out the function page for [man]fsockopen[/man], as I believe Example 1 is exactly what we want to do.

Simply change this in the example:

   fwrite($fp, $out);
   while (!feof($fp)) {
       echo fgets($fp, 128);
   }

to this:

   fwrite($fp, $out);
   $content = "";
   while (!feof($fp)) {
       $content .= fgets($fp, 128);
   }

bill_stennett

Many thanks for the reply - I'll have a look at this.

One thing though - if I only needed to get the content of the page rather than the header information as well is this easier?

What would be the functions I need to just read the contents of a remote URL. Is it fopen() that I should use?

Since I have control of the URL I'm reading the data from I could modify it to return the information in the body content rather than the header.

Since I'm new to PHP anything that keeps the PHP side of things simple would be a bonus for me.

Best,

Bill

bradgrafelman

Yep; very simple!

$data = readfile('http://www.example.com/mypage.htm');

$data contains the actual content returned by the server.

NOTE: [man]readfile[/man] has a requirement for fopen(). Read the manual page if the above code does not work. Also, you MUST include the 'http://' prefix when reading URL's with this function.

bill_stennett

Hi again - I just wanted to say that I got the fsockopen call working and it does just what I need. I get the complete response back from the web server - headers and content.

All I need to do is parse out the relevant bits that I need and that's it.

The readfile solution is also very good for getting only the file content. I may modify the script that is being called to return data in the body of the file so I can use the readfile in due course.

Suddenly I'm spoilt for choice ;-)

Many thanks for your help.

Bill

bradgrafelman

Glad you got it working. Don't forget to mark this thread "solved" using the link at the bottom of the page.